The rapid and uneven expansion of comparative political analytics, indicated by analysis of doctoral dissertation topics from 1948 through 1966 has many implications for the discipline. Ultimately, as Almond suggests, comparative politics may disappear as a sub-discipline. In the immediate future, however, comparativists will continue to be confronted with serious problems. The rapid collection of data may impede orderly assimilation into a framework. Unpredictable selection of national systems for research may delay systematic comparison even within related groups of national systems. The kinds of systems which must be studied by political science now range from primitive to highly developed and the sphere of analyzable phenomena within each system has been enlarged by politicization of the whole social order. This has stretched the traditional competence of political science to its outer limits and until its research apparatus matches this new responsibility, the consequent sophistication of subvillage analysis is likely to be less than satisfactory. The fascination of models to explicate political phenomena and eventually to construct theory holds certain risks which are quickly being overcome by prominence of the scientific method. All of these difficulties arising from the relationship of hypothesizing to evidential corroboration are transitory but important. The use of function and of institutions as units of comparison are not mutually exclusive, but rather interdependent. Functionalism is viewed as an intellectual disposition rather than as an operationally useful construct. Functions are revealed by scrutiny of institutions whose changing roles in a system are determined by transmutation of function. Institutions may be evaluated by indices relevant to both transitional and mature systems. Such relevance is established by emphasizing the dual disequilibrium of transitional systems and the dynamic change in institutional and functional roles. The cruciality of measuring institutional effectiveness in a system arises from its power to explain variations in form and transmutations of function. The ultimate question of why function and institutions occur in given systems in various forms can be answered by associating these factors with a virtually limitless mass of aggregate data drawn from the total cultural configuration. The process of ordering and associating these data depends on computer technology. The degree of scientization of units which are thus associated, i.e., function, institutional manifestation, institutional effectiveness, configurative data, will vary from highly impressionistic to rigorously empirical. The mode of articulating configurative data with the other associated units will depend increasingly on scientization of related disciplines and on effective linkages between political science and those disciplines.

The first territory to be returned to Japan by the United States since the 1945 surrender is a group of the Ryukyu Islands. This fact focuses attention on this strategically important archipelago extending from southernmost Japan to Formosa, although the Ryukyus have been at least on the periphery of Western attention for two centuries. The chief compulsions for American popular interest in the islands have been the Battle of Okinawa of World War II and, more recently, the best selling novel and Broadway hit, The Teahouse of the August Moon.

This transitory and popular interest will undoubtedly give way to wider international attention in the next few years as the Japanese become more articulate in their criticism of the questionable grounds on which these islands were stripped from Japan Proper at the end of the war. Of further significance to political science is the fact that Okinawa, major island of the group, is (excepting only the Bonins) the last area of the world to remain under complete American military government control. The character of this nearly ten-year rule by the United States and its impact on a million people who have continually demanded “reversion” to Japan must inevitably be the subject of study of those interested in the confluence of cultures under conditions of sustained military government.